The Songland mentor opens up about writing hits for Kacey Musgraves, Miranda Lambert and more
The Grammy winner recently opened up to PEOPLE about some of the most meaningful tracks he’s written over the years.
“You start with an idea, and you're so stuck on that idea that as the hook evolves, you still can't think of it as anything else. We kept singing, ‘I bet you're in a bar, listening to a cheating song,’ and then ultimately the payoff was, ‘I bet you're in a bar because I'm always your last call,’” he recalls. “We pitched it with the title ‘I Bet You're in a Bar’ to Lee Ann Womack because we didn't have that 'last call' piece for most of the day.
“Kenny was the most influential record maker on the radio. He was the one everybody wanted to get their songs recorded by,” he says. “When that happened, everything sort of took off.”McAnally calls Miranda Lambert’s No. 1, “Mama’s Broken Heart,” “the most true-to-life song that's ever been a hit for me.”
“‘Merry Go ’Round’ is the song that it feels like a metaphor for our relationship and the kind of songs we made from the beginning — and the fact that we both came from small towns,” he says of the track, which they worked on with fellow songwriter Josh Osborne.On a visit to her home in Texas, “we were talking about the people that live next door to us, and they had these cars and all are in the driveway and in the front yard,” McAnally recalls.
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